Furniture for dogs: join the kennel club

Kenya Hara, creative director of Muji, believes your best friend deserves to live in style. He's providing free blueprints of these products so that you can start your very own pet project
•Canine comforts: in pictures

The dog house has traditionally been a bad place to be, but if Kenya Hara has his way, that's set to change. Hara is a designer, curator and creative director of Muji and his latest project aims to bring a better quality of life to the canine world. His new company – Architecture for Dogs – provides architectural blueprints for products, each designed with a specific breed in mind, but suitable for all four-legged friends. Soon they'll be available on a dedicated website, free to download for any pet owner who wants to improve Rover's lifestyle.

"Dogs are basically forced to live in a human-scaled environment," says Hara. "This may be out of our control, but I believe it's beneficial for humans to be cognisant of that reality."

Hara asked 12 of his design and architecture chums to consider this problem and create structures that would make man think about his best friend a little more carefully. The results range from the aesthetically pleasing to the absurd. Elien Deceunick and Mick van Gemert of Dutch architectural practice MVRDV created a Beagle house on runners. The aptly named Atelier Bow-Wow made a chair that lets a Dachshund sit at eye-level with his owner. New-York based practice Reiser + Umemoto contributed what looks like a spacesuit for Laika. The futuristic dog coat was made to cover up an employee's hairless Chihuahua that ran around the office – partly because not everyone found the animal attractive, partly because research showed that Chihuahuas love being in small, enclosed spaces.

Hara says he chose dogs as the starting point for his project because they're a "universally understood concept". He says his pace of life doesn't allow him to have a dog now, but he had one as a child. "I had a Spitz. I had to walk him every day. It was a chore. I definitely felt like I lived with that dog."

The project will be launched at Design Miami in December, but the instructions to create your own version of these products are already available to download. Hara hopes people will upload images of the structures they build and customise from these blueprints – pictures will then be used in a final exhibition of the project at Tokyo's Toto Gallery in October 2013.

"I wondered what happened at the intersection of dog lovers and architecture enthusiasts and I wanted to test that on the internet, so I thought of free downloads," he explains. "People throughout the world can get excited about the idea of dogs together."

These whimsical designs may not be for every pet owner. They may not be for every dog. But Hara readily admits that himself. He sees them as "an unsolicited gift to dogs. Like all presents, this can render a dog bewildered, surprised, and maybe even happy."